Playing By Ear
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Image of Guitarmore playing a Martin D28 Guitar Playing by Ear:
Learn to Play By Ear 101: Playing melody notes
AS a guitarist, you may have heard your friend pick up a guitar and just start playing along with some tune they hear being played.
Your friend may be playing music that he or she is thinking up in his or her head and playing it immediately on the guitar.
And you’ve admired your friend’s skill for being able to play a tune by ear. And you wondered how he or she was able to do it.
And you knew that you definitely wanted to learn how to do it.
PLAYING music by ear is easier than you may think:
Playing by ear, reading tablature and reading music notation are several of the most common methods used to play music on the guitar.
Playing by ear means that you can listen to music being played and play along with that music by hearing the pitch of the note in your brain and duplicating it on the guitar fingerboard.
Playing by ear also means that you can play notes that you imagine or hear in your mind.
As it is mentioned later in this web site, to play the guitar, you only need to know how to do three things:
1) How to play a note
2) When to play the note and
3) What note to play.
It sounds too simple, but that’s all there is to it when analyzed in its most basic essence.
Item 1: How To Play the Note:
Unless you are incredibly talented, musically gifted and can immediately find any note on a guitar fingerboard when you hear the note that you are trying to reproduce, you are going to need to learn a few basic things: …some scales, …a few musical rules.
You will be able to learn how to play by ear even if you do not know the name of the notes.
You will become a more proficient at playing by ear if you know the names on the notes on the fingerboard.
For example, if you see someone playing a G chord… …and you know where the G notes are on the neck… …you will be able to play along by ear with that person sooner than by hunting and pecking around trying to locate the correct note on the fingerboard.
This part of playing by ear (how to play the note)… … is kind of the mechanical part of playing guitar by ear.
You will learn some scale and fingerboard basics on this website.
There are other websites devoted to scales and scale patterns… …which are helpful for adding more tools in your playing music by ear skills tool box.
Item 2: When to play the note:
When playing by ear, when to play the note is a matter of you hearing music being played and copying and reproducing the rythymnsthat you hear.
This method works even if you do not know music theory.
An example of playing by ear is when you hear a tune being played and you can hum or sing the tune immediately… … even without knowing the names of the notes or the time values of the notes being played.
Item 3: What note to play:
What note to play is the magical part about playing by ear.
Playingmusic by ear will impress your friends. It will give you a great sense of enjoyment and accomplishment.
To explain how to learn what note to play, consider an analogy using the days of the week.
Take the days of the week, Sunday, Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, Friday, Saturday, and then back to Sunday. Number the those days from 1 to 8.
There are 8 notes in a musical scale. So let’s say that the days of the week correspond to the 8 notes of the music scale.
This first basic scale we are learning is commonly referred to as a major scale.
The distance or intervals between each note in the scale is not equal or the same.
In the analogy ofthe intervals betweeen stair steps, the steps are an equal distance apart from each other.
With a major scale, thestair step analogy is: There are seven steps between the eight notes of the scale. The height of the step between the third and the fourth note of the scale, and the height of the step between the seventh and the eighth note of the scale is only half of the height of the other five steps.
So the first part of what note to play when playing by ear…
1. Listen to the pitch of the first note of the song and to determine where it occurs in the scale.
2. Listen to the pitch of the second note being played.
3. Us the sample songs you have leanred to identify the different musical intervals.
…and to use mental tools that you have learned to tell you what the pitch of the second note is relative to the pitch of the first note.
Listen for the intervals between the notes: How far apart in pitch the two notes are?
And throughout the remainder of the song… …you need to be listening for the musical intervals between the preceeing and the following note throughout the song.
The difference in pitch between notes is called an interval.
The interval between the first and last note (the 8th note) of the common (major) scale is one octave.
Let’s say that from Sunday to Sunday, an 8 day period, represents the interval of one musical octave: Because there are 8 notes in a scale and the distance between the first and last note in the 8 note scale defines an octave. So if you are talking to a friend on Sunday and agree to get together on Wednesday, you know that Sunday is the first day of the week (analogous to the first note of the musical scale) and Wednesday ist he fourth day of the week (ana logous to the fourth note of the musical scale). So the musical analogy for this interval is called a 4th.
Or if you and your friend are talking together on Thursday, and agree that you will get together on Friday, the musical analogy is that your starting point or frame of reference (Thursday) is the fifth note in the musical scale (fifth day of the week) and the following note (Friday) is the sixth note in the scale (sixth day of the week). So the analogous musical interval for the Thursday to Friday interval is called a �2nd� (a 2 day interval).
Planning an event on a particular day of the week for an activity that is to occur some number of days later in the week is similar to when you hear two musical notes being played, that you can identify…
1) where the first note occurs in the scale and 2) the musical interval to the second note from the first note.
The trick is… …well it is not really a trick, it is a learned skill along with your combined musical talent/ability/ear… …when playing music by ear, is that you must:
1) Hear where each note occurs in the musical scale.
2) Hear and identify the intervals (differences in musical pitch) between successive notes in a song.
So, as you have probably figured out by now… …playing guitar by ear basically consists of:
1. Locating where in the scale the first note is located.
2. Locating where the second note is relative to the first note (and relative to where the second note is in the scale)
3. Repeating the process for each note in the song.
And with a little learning and practice… …the brain can perform this complex process instantaneously, without you consciously thinking about the process.
There are numerous ways to learn to identify the musical pitches between successive notes.
A simple method is to think of a song that you know well that is an example for each of the different intervals in the scale.
The chart below lists songs and lyrics to familiar songs, which are examples to illustrate the different music intervals in the most common scale, the 8 note scale commonly referred to as a major scale.
You can create your own similar chart using songs that you may be more familiar with.
In each of the following examples, the first note of the interval is the first note of the scale in which the song is written.
The first note in a scale is known as the “tonic”. (See the following lesson).
The musical pitch difference between the two notes is called an interval.
The first column in the chart below lists the interval or musical distance between the first note you know and the second note in the scale using non-music theory wording.
The second column in the chart below lists the name of the interval using musical theory vocabulary.
The bold font in the words of the songs listed in the third column lists the musical intervals referenced in column one ******************************************************************************************************************
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Image of Chart With Musical Intervals For Playing By Ear:
Countless other songs may be used as an aid to help you remember the pitch intervals in your head.
You may, as I do, also use additional songs to identify pitch intervals in tunes we are trying to play by ear.
It may also be helpful to refer to the song in the movie, The Sound of Music, Do-Re-Mi…
…as another mental tool for being able to identify musical intervals in songs you are trying to play by ear.
There are also numerous websites that teach playing by ear using this method, sometimes referred to as solfe’ge (also known as solfeggio or solfa).
After gaining proficiency in identifying the intervals in the major scale described above…
…you can pick out songs, familiar to you, that you can use as your reference as a tool to help you play by ear.
…that will help you hear and identify the intervals of musical notes to songs that have “sharps” or “flats” in them…
…that have been raised or lowered a half step within in the key in which the music was written.
This is a very simplified beginners discussion about playing music by ear…
… just to introduce you to the basics of the topic…
…and perhaps be helpful to you in understanding more technical explanations on other websites.
One of the fun and personally rewarding things about playing guitar by ear…
You can spend an entire life time continuing to learn more methods and techniques of improving your �playing by ear� skills…
Or perhaps you are a type of guitarist who has received all the fun they need concerning playing the guitar by ear by simply reading this article.
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